Month: August 2018

59 startups took the stage at Y Combinator’s Demo Day 2  and among the highlights were a company that helps developers manage in-app subscriptions; a service that lets you create animojis from real photos; and a surplus medical equipment reselling platform. Oh… and there was also a company that’s developed an entirely new kind of life form using e coli bacteria. So yeah, that’s happening.

Based on some investor buzz and what caught TechCrunch’s eye, these are our picks from the second day of Y Combinator’s presentations.

You can find the full list of companies that presented on Day 1 here, and our top picks from Day 1 here. 

64-x

With a founding team including some of the leading luminaries in the field of biologically inspired engineering (including George Church, Pamela Silver, and Jeffrey Way from Harvard’s Wyss Institute) 64-x is engineering organisms to function in otherwise inaccessible environments. Chief executive Alexis Rovner, herself a post-doctoral fellow at the Wyss Institute, and chief operating officer Ryan Gallagher, a former BCG Consultant, are looking to commercialize research from the Institute around accelerating and expanding the ability to produce functionalized proteins and sequence-defined polymers with diverse chemistries. Basically they’ve engineered a new life form that they want to use for novel kinds of bio-manufacturing.

Why we liked it: These geniuses invented a new life form.

CB Therapeutics

Sher Butt, a former lab directory at Steep Hill, saw that cannabinoids were as close to a miracle cure for pain, epilepsy and other chronic conditions as medicine was going to get. But plant-based cannabinoids were costly and produced inconsistent results. Alongside Jacob Vogan, Butt realized that biosynthesizing cannabinoids would reduce production costs by a factor of ten and boost production 24 times current yields. With a deep experience commercializing drugs for Novartis and as the founder of the cannabis testing company, SB Labs, Butt and his technical co-founder are uniquely positioned to bring this new therapy to market.

Why we liked it: Using manufacturing processes to make industrial quantities of what looks like nature’s best painkiller at scale is not a bad idea.

RevenueCat

RevenueCat helps developers manage their in-app subscriptions. It offers an API that developers can use to support in-app subscriptions on iOS and Android, which means they don’t have to worry about all the nuances, bugs and updates on each platform.

The API also allows developers to bring all the data about their subscription business together in one place. It might be on to something, though it isn’t clear how big that something is quite yet. The nine-month-old company says it’s currently seeing $350,000 in transaction volume every month; it’s making some undisclosed percentage of money off that amount.

Read more about RevenueCat here.

Why we liked it: Write code. Release app. Use RevenueCat. Get paid. That sounds like a good formula for a pretty compelling business.

 

Ajaib

Indonesia is a country in a transition, with a growing class of individuals with assets to invest yet who, financially, don’t meet the bar set by many wealth managers. Enter Ajaib, a newly minted startup with the very bold ambition of becoming the “Ant Financial of wealth management for Indonesia.” Why the comparison? Because China was in the same boat not long ago — a  country whose middle class had little access to wealth management advice. With the founding of Ant Financial nearly four years ago, that changed. In fact, Ant now boasts more than 400 million users.

China is home to nearly 1.4 billion, compared with Indonesia, whose population of 261 million is tiny in comparison. Still, if its plans work out to charge 1.4 percent for every dollar managed, with an estimated $370 billion in savings in the country to chase after, it could be facing a meaningful opportunity in its backyard if it gains some momentum.

Why we liked it: If Ajaib’s wealth management plans (to charge 1.4 percent for every dollar it manages) work out — and with a total market of $370 billion in savings in Indonesia — the company could be facing a meaningful opportunity in its backyard.

 

Grin

The scooter craze is hitting Latin America and Grin is greasing the wheels. The Mexico City-based company was launched by co-founder Sergio Romo after he and his partner realized they weren’t going to be able to get a cut of the big “birds” on the scooter block in the U.S. (as Axios reported). Romo and his co-founder have already lined up a slew of investors for what may be the hottest new deal in Latin America. Backers include Sinai Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, 500 Startups, Monashees and Base10 Partners.

Why we liked it: Scooters are so 2018. But there’s a lot of money to be made in mobility, and as the challenge from Bird and Lime to Uber and Lyft in hyperlocal transit has revealed, there’s no dominant player that’s taken over the market… yet.

Emojer

Creating animated emojis made from real photos, Emojer just might be the most fun you can have with a camera. The company’s software uses deep learning algorithms to detect body parts and guides users in creating their own avatars with just a simple photo take from a mobile phone. It’s replacing deep Photoshop expertise and animation skills with a super simple interface. The avatars look very similar to Elf Yourself, a popular site that let you paste your friends’ faces on dancing Christmas elves that went viral every year at Christmastime. Founders have PhDs in machine learning and computer vision.

Why we liked it: As the company’s chief executive said, Snap was for sexting, and Facebook was hot or not, so who says the next big consumer platform couldn’t be the trojan horse of easily generated selfiemojis (akin to Elf Yourself)?

Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals

Osh’s Affordable Pharmaceuticals is a public benefit corporation connecting doctors and patients with sources of low-cost, compounded pharmaceuticals. The company is looking to decrease barriers to entry for drugs for rare diseases. Three weeks ago the company introduced a drug to treat Wilson’s Disease. There was no access to the drug that treats the disease before in Brazil India or Canada. It slashes the cost of drugs from $30,000 a month to $120 per month. The company estimates it has a total addressable market of $17 billion. “Generic drug pricing is a crisis, people are dying because they can’t get access to the medicine they need,” says chief executive Alex Oshmyansky. Osh’s might have a solution.

Why we liked it: Selling lower-cost medications for rare diseases in countries that previously hadn’t had access to them is a good business that’s good for the world.

Medinas Health

Tackling a $75 billion problem of healthcare waste Medinas Health is giving hospitals an easy way to resell their used and a and supplies. The company has already raised $1 million for its marketplace to help healthcare organizations buy and sell equipment. With a seed round led by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, and General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures fund, the company is also working to lower costs for cash-strapped rural health care centers.

Why we liked it: Finding uses for hospital equipment that’s been lying fallow in corners is a big business. A $75 billion dollar business if Medinas’ estimates are correct. Add helping cut costs for rural medical facilities and Medinas is a business we can get behind.

And Comfort

Plus-size women have limited clothing options even at the largest retailers like Nordstrom and Macy’s. While a majority of American women fall into the plus-size clothing category, 100 million women are constrained to shopping for a very small percentage of options. And Comfort wants to solve the supply problem. To do this, the founders, two former Harvard classmates, are building a direct-to-consumer fashion brand with stylish, minimalist offerings for plus-size women, including tunic shirts and an apron dress. It’s very early days for the brand, but since launching in recent weeks, they’ve seen $25,000 in sales.

Why we liked it: This direct-to-consumer fashion brand is bringing higher quality, better-designed clothing options to a market that’s underserved and growing quickly. What’s not to like?

 

ShopWith

Influencers of the world are uniting on mobile app, ShopWith, which allows shoppers to browse virtual storefronts and aisles alongside their favorite fashion and beauty creators and YouTubers. Users can see exactly what products those influencers have featured and can buy them without ever leaving the app. It’s a free download and hours of commercially consumptive fun.

It’s like the QVC model, but for GenZ shoppers whose buying habits are influenced by social video content on YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat. The company revealed that one beauty influencer made $10,000 within five hours, using the ShopWith platform. The founders are former product managers with experience building social commerce products at Facebook and Amazon.

Why we liked it: The QVC for GenZ not only has a nice ring to it, it’s a recipe for making cash registers hum. A mobile-first, influencer-based shopping company is something that we’d definitely not call an impulse purchase.

One of the best features of the new Gmail is its quick-access side panel with easy access to Google Calendar, Tasks, Keep and your Gmail extensions. Now, Google is bringing this same functionality to Google Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drawings, too.

In Google Calendar, you’ll be able to quickly access Keep and Tasks, while in the rest of the G Suite apps, you’ll get easy access to Calendar, Keep and Tasks.

In Gmail, the side panel also brings up access to various G Suite extensions that you may have installed from the marketplace. It doesn’t look like that’s possible in Docs and Calendar right now, though it’s probably only a matter of time before there will be compatible extensions for those products, too. By then, we’ll likely see a “works with Google Calendar” section and support for other G Suite apps in the marketplace, too.

I’m already seeing this in my personal Google Calendar, but not in Google Docs, so this looks to be a slow rollout. The official word is that paying G Suite subscribers on the rapid release schedule should get access now, with those on the slower release schedule getting access in two weeks.

An ESA mission 20 years in the making is set to take off today, launching the first satellite to monitor the planet’s winds directly — and using a giant laser, at that. Aeolus takes off from French Guiana at nearly midnight there, about 2:20 PM Pacific time, and you can watch the launch live here.

Aeolus, named after the Greek god who was the keeper of the winds, is a satellite designed and approved way back in 1999 but only recently completed and deemed ready for launch. It’s essentially a vehicle for a single payload, the Atmospheric Laser Doppler Instrument, or “Aladin,” essentially an orbital lidar system.

Once in orbit, Aladin will blast the surface with a 10-megawatt ultraviolet laser 50 times per second, tracking the minute changes evident in the reflected beam caused by air molecules and other matter in the atmosphere. 20 separate measurements done on the laser light allow the satellite to determine the exact velocity of the wind where it’s pointing.

Believe it or not, measuring the wind from space hasn’t really been done. Sure, you can observe cloud patterns and infer that air in some places is behaving in a certain way. But there has been no space-based, global-scale mission to directly measure the direction of the wind.

This information should prove extremely valuable, since it will allow for much improved weather prediction, especially in areas like the tropics where there are fewer stations and weather balloons (yes, they use them) from which to collect data. As such the Aeolus mission may help understand and predict the genesis and paths of tropical storms, giving people more timely and accurate warnings.

Weather in areas rich in balloons should also be improved by a few percent of accuracy — which doesn’t sound like a lot, but really is, especially for aerospace businesses, farmers, and others whose livelihood revolves around the weather.

Ironically (though not particularly worryingly), Aeolus’s first intended launch date was scrubbed because of high winds. If only there were a satellite that could have helped predict that.

Aeolus’s orbit is a slightly unusual one called a sun-synchronous dusk/dawn orbit. It will hover at 320 kilometers above the terminator, the line demarcating night from day, while circling around the poles every 90 minutes. So it’s zipping in the north-south axis at great speed, and takes a week to sample the whole globe.

Data is fired off to a station in Svalbard, Norway once every orbit, and the plan right now is to distribute that data within three hours to the meteorological authorities who will be using it for their own purposes.

The satellite has been in French Guiana since July and has been loaded up atop a Vega rocket since earlier this month. Live coverage should begin at 23:00 local time, 14:00 (2:00 PM) Pacific time, and liftoff is planned for 20 minutes after that. It should take almost an hour for the full deployment process to take place, so we’ll know shortly afterwards if all went well.

According to Chinese numerology, 48 represents a determination to prosper — as in business. How fitting, because 48 also represents the number of hours you have left to reserve your place in Startup Alley, the huge exhibition floor at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018, which takes place on September 5-7.

Disrupt events are all about creating prosperity, so if you want to exhibit your early-stage startup in front of more than 10,000 attendees — including influential investors, technologists, entrepreneurs and media — buy a Disrupt SF Startup Alley Exhibitor Package before August 24 at 5 p.m. PT.

Startup Alley will be home to more than 1,200 early-stage startups and sponsors from just about every vertical. Secure your spot and you can join them as they showcase their latest tech products, platforms and services to potential customers, future investors and more than 400 media outlets.

What do you get in your value-packed Startup Alley Exhibitor Package? We’re glad you asked.

• Two Founder passes for all three days of Disrupt SF 2018
• One day to exhibit on the Startup Alley show floor
• Use of CrunchMatch — our curated investor-to-startup matching platform
• Access to The Main Stage, The Next Stage, The Q&A Stage, The Showcase Stage
• All workshops
• Access to the attendee list; ability to message attendees with the Disrupt App
• Attend the TC After Party

Plus, every Startup Alley exhibitor has a chance to win one of two Wild Card slots to compete in Startup Battlefield — this year’s grand prize is a whopping $100K. Not only did that happen to Recordgram at Disrupt NY 2017, they went on to win the entire Battlefield!

Only 48 hours left to capitalize on the prosperity potential awaiting you in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF 2018 on Sept. 5-7. Go buy a Disrupt SF Startup Alley Exhibitor Package before time — and opportunity — runs out.

Lyft has hired Google veteran Manish Gupta as vice president of engineering to build out the ride-hailing company’s business platforms, including enterprise, partnerships, and healthcare.

Gupta will report directly to Peter Morelli. He will work alongside Ran Makavy, who heads up Lyft’s ride-share technology team, CFO Chris Lambert, and Katie Dill, the company’s vice president of design.

In this newly created position, Gupta will also oversee Lyft employees working on payments, fraud prevention, and privacy.

Gupta’s hiring comes amid explosive growth at the ride-hailing company. Two years ago, Lyft’s ride-hailing app was accessible in less than 50% of the U.S. and had only 17% market share—far behind rival Uber.

Today, Lyft has 96% coverage in the U.S. and 35% market share. The company’s driver network has grown from 315,000 in 2015 to 1.4 million drivers in 2017. It’s employee ranks have grow more than fivefold to 3,600 people.

The ride-hailing company’s bookings run rate based on a second quarter estimate is $7.7 billion.

Lyft Business, the company’s enterprise unit, has also expanded in the past two years as it partners with more organizations and companies like Starbucks, LAX, Allstate, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, JetBlue, Delta, and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

The company is increasingly focused on the potential of these business partnerships, particularly with healthcare organizations and non-emergency medical transport. For example, a hospital or doctor’s office, could use a desktop version of the Lyft app to order a ride for a patient. Lyft already has partnerships with some of the largest health systems in the U.S., including Ascension, Denver Health System, Hennepin County Medical Center and El Camino Hospital.

It’s in here where Lyft hopes to tap into Gupta’s experience.

Gupta has been at Google since 2002 in a variety of roles, most recently leading its Google Ads’ buy-side platform. During Manish’s 16-year tenure at Google, he also built AdSense for TV, Video and Display ads, and the billing and payments system for advertisers and publishers.

Amazon may be betting on the convenience of cashier-less stores, but Target is instead focused on order-ahead e-commerce. The company’s Drive Up service, which allows shoppers to place orders online, then pick up at a nearby store without getting out of their car, is now on track to reach nearly 1,000 U.S. stores before the end of the year. Meanwhile, its same-day delivery business is now live at 1,100 stores across 160 markets, and will reach 65% of U.S. households by year-end.

This week, Target said it’s expanding its Drive Up service to two more key markets, Colorado and California, where it will begin to roll out over the next month to 128 stores.

In total, Target Drive Up service is available today at over 800 stores in 25 states.

Like Walmart’s grocery pickup service, Drive Up is popular among parents with small children, where everyday shopping can be difficult. Parents, especially those with babies, have been using Drive Up for restocking their household essentials like diapers, Target says. But other shoppers have been using Drive Up as a means of getting larger, bulky online purchases – like TVs – loaded straight into their vehicles.

The service has grown to be one of the highest-rated services by Target shoppers, since its launch in the retailer’s home market of Minneapolis last fall, the retailer told us.

Drive Up, however, is only one of now several e-commerce initiatives Target has underway.

The company also offers a next-day delivery service called Target Restock, which it recently expanded nationwide. The service also now offers free delivery for all Target REDcard purchases. That means it’s a way to get items faster than Amazon Prime, without Amazon’s ever-increasing Prime membership fee or Pantry surcharge. It arrives, too, at a time when Prime customers are complaining about the speed of their shipments – items labeled Prime are often arriving late these days, and people are noticing.

This leaves room for other e-commerce players like Target and Walmart to go after Amazon’s unhappy customers with services of their own. Walmart, for instance, may be contemplating its own Prime-like program, given the news that it’s building out its own streaming service.

Target, which reported stellar earnings this week, has been working to win back marketshare from Amazon for some time.

Last year, Target said it would invest $7 billion into expanding its e-commerce business and its fix its stores, in order to better cater to shoppers’ changing habits.

The company is now in the process of remodeling 1,100 stores by the end of 2020 to address the order-ahead customer base. The new designs will include more space for customer order pickups, more parking for Drive Up, self-checkout lanes, and grab-and-go essentials near the front. It’s also opening small-format stores, many near college campuses.

Target today now also offers customers online order pick-up in stores, same-day grocery delivery through its Shipt acquisition, same-day delivery of in-store sales in select urban markets, and voice shopping in partnership with Google.

Today, Target shares are surging based on its just reported Q2 earnings where the retailer reported the strongest same-stores sales growth in 13 years, along with Q2 profit and revenue surpassing analyst expectations. Target reported $17.78 billion in revenue vs. $17.28 billion expected, and net income of $799 million, or $1.49 per share, compared with $671 million, or $1.21 a share, a year ago.

Target also said digital sales were up more than 40% during the quarter, and raised its earnings outlook for the year as a result.

The retailer has benefitted from the overall healthy e-commerce industry, however. Its one-day sale in July timed with Amazon’s Prime Day, drove its e-commerce sales this quarter, it said. It’s being boosted, too, by the closing of Toys R Us and Babies R Us, by grabbing market share in toys, games, and diapers and other baby needs.

Earth Class Mail, a company that digitizes your physical mail so you don’t have to go to the mailbox every day, today announced that it has acquired receipt scanning and expense tracking service Shoeboxed.

The reason Earth Class Mail would be interested in Shoeboxed is pretty obvious, given that both companies focus on taking the pain out of dealing with paper. Both services will continue to operate as usual, though we’ll likely see some deep integrations between the two over time.

Shoeboxed, which launched eleven years ago, currently digitizes over five million documents per year for its over 1 million customers in 90 countries. Its main market is small businesses in the U.S., though, which make up 500,000 of its users.

“When we started in 2008 and put the first iPhone app in the app store to scan receipts; there was one other powerhouse around helping small business go digital — Earth Class Mail,” the company’s CEO and co-founder Tobias Walter tells us. “The combined power of our two companies will be a massive shift for small businesses to finally become paperless and say goodbye to old workflows that cost them hours of their productivity. I could not be happier with the new home we found for the company, the team, and our customers!”

What sets Earth Class Mail apart from the United States Postal Service’s Informed Delivery service is that it not only scans the outside of the envelopes that you are about to receive but that you can also give the company permission to scan all the documents inside, too (and the price you pay for the service depends mostly on how many of these full scans you want per month). While Oregon-based Earth Class Mail had to file for bankruptcy protection in 2015, its new leadership team turned the company around. The company says that its annual run rate is now $10 million, up 20 percent since Jess Garza become its new CEO last December.

Walter also notes that users would occasionally send unopened envelopes, too, but the company wasn’t allowed to open them. These customers can now easily become Earth Class Mail users.

Over the course of its existence, Shoeboxed only raised a moderate amount of funding, with a $580,000 Series A round led by Novak Biddle Venture Partners in 2008 (when Series A rounds were still much smaller than today) and a $1.4 million Series B round in 2011. The financial details of today’s acquisition were not disclosed.

It was quite a week for Slack, wasn’t it? The enterprise communications platform confirmed this publication’s earlier report that it had scored another $427 million investment on an over-the-moon valuation of over $7 billion. Slack took a market that had once been in the doldrums and turned it into something significant by making itself more than a communications tool.

It changed the game by making itself a work hub. Through APIs and UI updates, it has made it simple for countless third parties (like Evernote) to integrate with Slack and provide the long-sought workplace hub for the enterprise. Instead of task switching, you can work mostly in one place and keep your focus on your work.

It’s quite a value proposition and it has enabled Slack to raise $1.2 billion (with a b) across 11 funding rounds, according to data on Crunchbase. They have grown to 8 million daily active users. They boast 70,000 teams paying to use it. Whatever they are doing, it’s working.

Competing with corporate behemoths

That said, Slack’s success has always been a bit surprising because it’s facing off against giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Cisco, Salesforce and many others, all gunning for this upstart’s market. In fact, Microsoft is giving Teams away for free to Office 365 customers. You could say it’s hard to compete with free, yet Slack continues to hold its own (and also offers a free version, for the record).

Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t require customers to use any particular toolset. Microsoft Teams is great for Microsoft users. Google Hangouts is great for G Suite users. You’re already signed in and it’s all included in the package, and there is a huge convenience factor there, but Slack works on anything and with anything and companies have shown there is great value in that.

The question is can Slack continue to play David to these corporate behemoths or will patience, bushels of cash on hand and a long view allow these traditional tech companies to eventually catch up and pass the plucky newbie. Nobody can see into the future, but obviously investors recognize it takes a lot of capital to keep up with what the competition is bringing to the table.

Expanding their reach

They also clearly have some confidence in the company’s ability to keep growing and keep the titans at bay or they wouldn’t have thrown all of that moolah at them. Up until now, they seem to have always found a way, but they need to step up if they are going to keep it going.

Alan Lepofsky, an analyst with Constellation Research, who keeps a careful eye on the enterprise collaboration market, says in a recent video commentary that it’s great they got all this money, but now that someone has shown them all of this dough, they have to prove they know what to do with it.

“For Slack to continue to be successful, they need to expand beyond what they are currently doing and really, truly redefine the way people communicate, collaborate, coordinate around their work. They need to branch out to project management, task management, content creation — all sorts of things more than just collaboration.”

What comes next?

Lepofsky says this could happen via a build or buy scenario, or even partnering, but they need to use their money strategically to differentiate the product from the hefty competition and stay ahead in this market.

The other elephant in the room is the idea that one of the competing mega corporations could make a run at them and try to acquire them. It would take a boat load of money to make that happen, but if someone had the cojones to do it, they would be getting the state of the art, the market share, the engineering, the whole package.

For now, that’s pure speculation. For now, Slack is sitting comfortably on a huge cash pile, and perhaps they should go shopping and expand their product set with their newly found wealth, as Lepofsky suggests. If they can do that, maybe they can keep the technology wolves from the door and make their way down the path to their seemingly inevitable IPO.

Monument Valley, the award-winning and beautifully designed mobile puzzler from ustwo Games, is being turned into a movie, according to a report from Deadline. While the game involves a manipulating Escher-like architecture in order to guide a princess through her quest, the movie version will feature live-action characters being thrown into the game’s “mind-bending world,” the report says.

Paramount Pictures and Akiva Goldsman’s Weed Road Pictures have selected Patrick Osborne to direct the movie, which the studios hope to turn into a franchise. There’s already more material for them to use, if that’s the case – Monument Valley’s sequel continued the story, this time guiding a mother and a child through the magical architecture.

Osborne won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for “Feast,” and is now directing “Nimona” for Fox and Blue Sky, based on the popular graphic novel. That experience could serve him well for this unusual choice.

“Monument Valley is a one of a kind experience, at once small in its meditative, simple gameplay, as well as enormous in its sense of history,” Osborne told Deadline, in a statement. “I’m privileged to be handed the reins to Ida’s mysterious kingdom, to play in her world of impossible architecture where seeing things differently is everything. I am thrilled to bring this unique world to theaters with the talented storytellers of Paramount and Weed Road.”

Dan Gray, Head of Ustwo Games also noted the company has been waiting for the right opportunity to bring the game to the big screen.

While it’s common for movie studios to option game material for their films, in this case, the choice appears to be largely based the name recognition Monument Valley offers, and the success of films with virtual worlds, as in “Ready Player One.” The game itself has been downloaded over 160 million times worldwide, giving the film version a built-in audience, and has won a number of awards from Apple and others.

Still, it’s hard to contemplate how Monument Valley will make for a compelling movie – the game’s storyline is minimal, lacking in dialog, and really only uses the character as a means of moving players from one puzzle to the next. The beauty of the game is its gorgeous animations and overall design, which are combined with a mesmerizing soundtrack to make gameplay more of a meditative experience. Whatever story will be told by the movie will be largely original, then, it seems.

Deadline says the studio is now looking for a screenwriter to craft that tale alongside Osborne. A release date was not announced.

 

 

 

It’s most likely not going to be out until October, but we’ve already seen a lot of Google’s Pixel 3. A lot, a lot. And here’s a lot more.

The umpteenth leak of the upcoming smartphone details just about every nook and cranny you could even want to see of the thing. In fact, there are actually competing leaks of the device this morning , one of which actually took the handset’s camera for a spin, publishing a number of those photos.

It’s tough to say how much of this is controlled leaking is intentional. Ultimately, these leaks keep the product on the radar well ahead of launch, even if they do remove most or all of the surprise. Whatever the case, this thing is all over the place. 

In the case of the Pixel 3/Pixel 3 XL, reaction seems to be reasonably positive to everything but that massive notch up top. Of course, Google’s really leaning in on the notch front, having added that functionality with the recent release of Android Pie.

The new photos comport with just about everything we’ve see so far, including the single camera on the rear and the inclusion of what appears to be a wired version of the Pixelbuds, which require the included USB-C dongle/adapter.

There’s a reported 2960 × 1440 pixel display on the 3 XL, beating out the 2 XL’s 2880×1440. That’s due in part to the fact that the new phone has a downright massive 6.7-inch display, per rumors. That towers over even the Note 9’s 6.4 inches.

By all accounts there’s a Snapdragon 845 here, which certainly makes sense. And, of course, the handset will be running Android Pie.

Oh yeah, and then there’s this.